Rosalea’s Staycation Pt 1: A Day in the Park at Richmond, CA

Rosalea’s 2012 Staycation - Part 1: A Day in
the Park at Richmond, CA

By Rosalea BarkerMay
27, 2012

I read a great vacation planning tip
in an Amtrak
tweet recently: Decide how you want to feel on your
vacation then go to the place that makes you feel that way.
Figuring that “oblivious to all that’s wrong with the
world” and “bed” were not going to hold up past the
first 72 hours of my two-week vacation, I settled on the
idea that I wanted to feel “relaxed”. Hawai’i maybe?
Well, no, since it involves the antonym of “relax”:
airports.

So here I am, staying at the Rosalea Residence
Suites—where the staff are apparently on strike, since I
have to make my own bed and clean up after myself. BUT it
has been declared an alarm-clock-free zone, with no
deadlines to meet or buses to catch unless I decide
otherwise. Which, yesterday, I did and attended the opening
day of the new visitor center at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Homefront National
Historical Park in Richmond. It’s easily accessible by
public transit—BART to Richmond, then the Marina
Bay-direction AC Transit No. 74 bus, which terminates at
Ford Point.

Richmond is an East Bay city that
figures most prominently in the local news for its high
death rate from shootings and the residents’ battles with its largest
corporate presence—Chevron’s oil refineries—over
issues of air pollution. Recently, it scored a major victory
over its East Bay neighbors, Berkeley and Oakland, by
winning the bid to be the second campus for the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory. The city’s mayor, Gayle McLaughlin, is also the only Green
Party mayor of such a large city.

Even before the US
entered WWII, Richmond was predominantly working class
because of the industries situated there, including a Ford
assembly plant, which was switched over to assembling
military vehicles when the war started. Long abandoned, the
building has been renovated and now houses businesses like
Sunpower, which produces solar power
systems worldwide.

Click
for big version.Ford assembly plants
looked much the same around the world—this one has a
magnificent view of San Francisco Bay. The bridges visible
in the photo below are the Gunmetal Grey western and eastern
spans of the Bay Bridge linking Oakland to San Francisco,
which were being built at the same time as that
International Orange floozy linking San Francisco to the
North Bay.

Even before the
United States’ entry into World War II, a huge influx of
workers from all around the US came to Richmond because
Henry Kaiser began production of “Liberty Ships” there in December 1940.
In a three-year period, Richmond’s population went from
20,000 to 100,00, with workers taking turns sleeping in the
beds rented out in shifts to match the round-the-clock
schedule at the three Kaiser shipyards that operated during
the war.

Although the women who worked in the
shipyards were better known as “Wendy the Welder”, Rosie
the (airplane) Riveter is a more widely known icon because
of WWII propaganda posters. The National Historic Park at
Ford Point in Richmond, CA, pays tribute to all those who
worked on the home front during WWII, and the artifacts reflect this. The banner below
shows a secretary from Ford’s Willow Run hangar in Michigan
demonstrating how to fold and wear the bandana forever
associated with women doing war work in factories across the
nation.

A trail links the Visitor Center to the
Rosie the Riveter Memorial on the site of Kaiser’s No. 2
Shipyard, and to several small parks also situated on Marina
Bay. The trail is for pedestrians and cyclists, and the
truly trail-hungry can continue east over a tidal marsh that
is home to a variety of birds—marbled godwits, sandpipers,
long-billed curlews. Its neighboring pools attract mallards,
American widgeons, and green-winged teals. (Godwits! Mallard! TEAL! It’s so reminiscent of New
Zealand!)

Nowhere, however does the National Park Service
literature on the trail mention raccoons, so I was surprised
to see a finger puppet of one in the Visitor Center store. I
guess it is, after all, a National Park—albeit the only
one in the US that the NPS doesn’t own, but instead
operates with a number of community partners, like the Rosie
the Riveter Trust—and National Parks are home to a host of
critters.

I leave you, therefore, with Rosie the Raccoon,
with which I shall embellish my middle finger before
gesturing to anyone who says “It can’t be
done.”

Scoop Citizen Members and ScoopPro Organisations are the lifeblood of Scoop.

20 years of independent publishing is a milestone, but your support is essential to keep Scoop thriving. We are building on our offering with new In-depth Engaged Journalism platform - thedig.nz.
Find out more and join us:

ALSO:

In the circumstances, yesterday’s move by Lam to scrap – rather than merely suspend – the hated extradition law that first triggered the protests three months ago, seems like the least she can do. It may also be too little, too late. More>>

The DOC-led draft Biodiversity Strategy seeks a “shared vision.” But there are more values and views around wildlife than there are species. How can we hope to agree on the shape of Aotearoa’s future biota? More>>

We are in a moment of existential peril, with interconnected climate and biodiversity crises converging on a global scale to drive most life on Earth to the brink of extinction… These massive challenges can, however, be reframed as a once in a lifetime opportunity to fundamentally change how humanity relates to nature and to each other. Read on The Dig>>